A hot potato: While plenty of companies are laying off workers as a direct result of AI, most of them tip-toe around the connection – or fail to mention it entirely. Not Indeed and Glassdoor's parent, which is laying off around 1,300 people at the firms because "AI is changing the world" – often not for the better, it seems.
Recruit Holdings, the Japanese parent company of job search and employee review giants Indeed and Glassdoor, is cutting around 6% of its HR Technology segment workforce.
In an email sent to employees on Thursday, Recruit Holdings CEO Hisayuki "Deko" Idekoba praised the miracle of AI – as so many CEOs and execs love to do.
"AI is changing the world, and we must adapt by ensuring our product delivers truly great experiences. Delivering on this ambition requires us to move faster, try new things, and fix what's broken," he wrote.
The cuts are targeting the two companies' research and development as well as the people & sustainability teams in the US, though other areas and regions will be affected. The move will also see the Glassdoor CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong departing.
Recruit Holdings is one of many companies to announce it would be investing heavily in AI – at the cost of human workers. During a fireside chat hosted by JPMorgan earlier this, Idekoba said that year one-third of the company's new code was being written by AI, and that the figure would soon reach 50%.
Idekoba isn't the first CEO to boast about how much company code AI is writing. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said last year that 25% of its code was written this way, and it's since risen to 50%. Microsoft boss Satya Nadella said it was 30% at his company, though it plans to increase the number to 60%.
Related reading: Study shows AI coding assistants actually slow down experienced developers
As part of Recruit Holdings' move toward using AI to help jobseekers and employers, it is also folding Glassdoor operations into Indeed.
Idekoba lamented the fact that while the HR industry is a $300 billion sector, it includes a 60% to 65% "human labor manual cost," something he said was much larger than other industries. The CEO added that AI could "simplify hiring" and "reduce manual work" – by replacing humans, apparently.
Indeed and Glassdoor laid off around 1,000 people in 2024 and about 2,200 in 2023.
Amazon, Anthropic, JP Morgan Chase, and many more companies are now warning that AI will be replacing millions of white-collars workers. There were concerns over what the technology would do to jobs from the very beginning, and now that it's becoming more advanced, those fears appear warranted.